It's called picking winners and losers. Perhaps otherwise the next winners might happen in other countries first. Is capitalism the best path to making that choice?

nt

And the reason I have a Twitter account devoted to emergencies. http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/seismic_waves.png

I feel your pain AC, even if you're being facetious. There is one Mac "game" listed, Second Life. If that isn't a giant middle finger then I'll go spit on Steve's grave ~Praise be the Jobs~.

Now I've lost an hour watching Wil Wheaton's TableTop. Seriously, it was delightful. Funny thing is I saw his picture on the website (my first time seeing him in a while) and wondered why I was looking at Fawkes--a character, I was surprised to find out, he played in The Guild.

because sometimes law enforcement doesn't know there are other browsers.

This "11-person team, primarily comprised of 20-somethings developers" contends they " can tell if you are a girl or buy, smart, dumb, old and youngcan tell if you’re a gambler or not, if a kid is color blind and confusing red and green. All this, just from a game." One has to believe that they have made numerous observations and reached conclusions but almost certainly they lack lengthy verifiable experiments to establish efficacy. I don't doubt that much they say can be shown to have value, there just needs to be more scientific rigor applied. The article is short on descriptions of what data they are seeing and how this relates to their assertions.

Just some thoughts and raw data. Respecting everyones' adulthood to discuss facts.

First from a Eurelectric PDF is the subject of compensation:

Finland

Compensation is paid after an application is filed by the customer. The compensation is based on the duration of the outage and the annual network fee.

United Kingdom

Functional demands are defined for normal operating and weather conditions and three different categories of abnormal conditions. At normal operating and weather conditions, 99.5 % of the customers should be reconnected within 18 hours. Outages >18h give a compensation of £50 for households and £100 for other customers. The Netherlands

For unplanned outages more than 4 hours the network company has to compensate household customers €35, small companies €910 and large industries €0.35 per kW subscribed power up to €91000.

Ireland

For unplanned outages, the network company guarantees reconnection within 24 hours. Customers without supply for more than 24 hours are compensated with €65 for households and €135 for companies. For each additional 12- hour interruption, €35 is paid additionally.

France

According to a 2001 law, all customers have a right to compensation. From 6 hours outage and for each following 6-hour period the transmission and distribution companies pay compensation corresponding to 2 % of the fixed annual charge.

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And next, on improvements. Here in the U.S. here is information from a PDF from Galvin Power.org

In the early 1990s, Naperville’s municipal utility was not performing well and the city council held a vote on whether to sell it to the larger, area-wide utility. At this time, three or four customer outages per year were common. The sale was defeated by onlyone vote in the city council and the municipal utility leadership decided instead to pursue perfect power reliability without raising costs. They started applying the concepts behind what is today known as Six Sigma or quality improvement. Over a period of almost 20 years, the local grid was transformed into one of the most reliable suburban grids in the country — without raising rates.

Primen. (2001). The Cost of Power Disturbances to Industrial and Digital Economy Companies. Consortium for Electric Infrastructure to Support a Digital Society. Madison: EPRI.

Galvin Electricity Initiative. (2010, April). Naperville Case Study. Retrieved from Galvin Electricity Initiative

oh wait, never mind.

Great explanation. The relevent section is found in the PDF: 3.6 Orbit characteristics and residence-time distributions for temporarily-captured orbiters. Quoting in part "A geocentric two-body orbit is not adequate for describing the motion of TCOs even for relatively short time periods".

Please see the DOT document entitled TRAFFIC FATALITIES IN 2010 DROP TO LOWEST LEVEL IN RECORDED HISTORY. I submit that the disparity in vehicle length, weight and power has never been higher than today. In the past car sizes were more uniform as compared to today's Smart car/Escalade match up, not to mention double length trailers. The above document shows that fatalities have decreased over time. My question is, how are these data explained? Even if we started in the decade when seat belts and airbags appear it seems apparent that the difference in fuel economy won't automatically mean more deaths.

They gave short shrift to the whole concept. I just tried voting and gave up. They have a confusing interface and show static pictures for what is definitely a dynamic media. I don't know how someone, who might consider themselves an artist but unfamiliar with the medium, might vote. I have played a lot and consider myself, at age 60, an active gamer but I haven't played all of these games. How do I determine my votes? In an analogous situation it's if the Oscars were decided by people who haven't participated in movie making were asked to vote but had only one still frame with which to judge the picture. Total crap.

How about Burn and Hurtie

Jim Henson won't mind.

NT